My new article series on MQA.

I’m not sure what you mean by this. The music industry would like the consumer to pay a “user fee”each time he/she listens to a piece of music, and DRM is the first step toward achieving that

 

Sorry, @LeeS , that's not a personal attack. @rbbert wrote, "Audiophiles everywhere can only hope for a bit more acknowledgement of this common sense argument seen up to now only very rarely in the audiophile press. LeeS could be a leader in this area, but so far he has chosen not to be."

He was expressing a view that the audiophile press should give more prominence to a particular argument in the MQA debate. He said you could be one of the people who does that, but so far you have chosen not to. That's purely a comment on the position you have taken within the MQA discussion. It says nothing about your personal character or motives.

You started this thread, and the title and subject explicitly makes you and your take on MQA the center of the discussion, and invites people to read and comment on your new article series. That's all that's happening here. The only way to prevent comments like rbbert's is not to start a thread like this in the first place. You made your bed, and to my eyes you're benefitting immensely because you're getting page views for your blog and bolstering your status as a thought-leader in the MQA debate.

Finally, you'll note that over at ComputerAudiophile (where I have the same username and avatar as here) I have been very clear that I am not accusing you of being a shill. That said, I will note that whenever you have been presented with an argument critical of MQA, you have responded with variations of, "I don't know," "that's not certain," "I had not heard that, I'll have to look into it," and so on. And yet any point in favor of MQA you have, by contrast, presented or accepted with a tone of total certainty. That's not an attack on your character - it's an observation based on the words you have written here and elsewhere. It's easy for anyone else to read your words and decide for themselves if my observation is accurate.

 

"But the concern is, in the future under MQA dominion, will consumer choices go away to buy an independent non-MQA hirez copy?"
That is the goal!

pull quote from here:
RIAA Spent $17.6 Million In Lawsuits... To Get $391,000 In Settlements?
From 2008-2010;
"So if we're doing some quick math, over a three year period, the RIAA spent over $64 million on this lawsuit campaign... which brought in about $1.4 million in settlement money. We're talking about getting back about 2% of the money spent. "

From the RIAA site:
"One credible analysis by the Institute for Policy Innovation concludes that global music piracy causes $12.5 billion of economic losses every year, 71,060 U.S. jobs lost, a loss of $2.7 billion in workers’ earnings, and a loss of $422 million in tax revenues, $291 million in personal income tax and $131 million in lost corporate income and production taxes. For copies of the report, please visit www.ipi.org."

Someone is thinking about DRM!

I am having trouble seeing how MQA will be good for DAC makers and consumers alike. I'm not part of the 32% however.

@tmtomh I read it as an attack. (and other posts of the sort)
Maybe people could change their tack?

 

Lee,
I think you have a very limited scope of what DRM means if you think "That’s still not DRM as you can copy MQA file." represents the end of the discussion on DRM.

MQA is nothing like THX! THX had actual value in standardizing theater playback - sound volumes, screen sizes, multichannel arrangement, architectural elements, acoustic technical requirements! MQA obviously CANNOT address whether we're listening with Apple earbuds or enjoying truly hi-res capable full-range speakers in a well dampened sound room.

All MQA can do is impose their vision of filtering, what is "good enough" lossy reconstruction, their idea of how files should be bit-depth limited, dithered, and noise shaped up to the level of your DAC. And if you ask many high end hardware designers, they will happily tell you that MQA does all of this while sacrificing potential resolution.

Before you continue to accuse me of having an issue with "encryption" itself and therefore "partisan"... I can accept DRM and copy protection. I buy my music like I buy my movies. Blu-Rays and UHD Blu-Rays all have DRM. I'm fine with that. My issue with MQA is that it is simply BAD as a high-res container, is incapable of advancing sound quality and disingenuously ignores obvious deficits raised while promoting myths of "time domain" deblurring and such. All while also reducing user's freedoms for a product inherently inferior in quality to a true hi-res 24/96 download.

If we have a situation where MQA coexists with true high-res downloads and stays in the streaming space, I'm fine with that. But going forward the idea of making MQA some kind of hi-res "standard", likely limiting release of actual lossless 24/96+ would be appalling. This would be a regression for audiophiles who desire the "best" in sound quality.

 

No you don't.

You get typically <16-bits of actual resolution and probably at best 17-bits equivalent. You get a lossy "origami" unfold. You get technically poor filtering with weak aliasing FIR filters. All at 24/44 or 24/48 data rate.

Come and get your next generation of "hi-res" folks . I just hope they don't stop selling 16/44 CD lossless!

 

What do you understand by conditional access?

All you need for full access to the decoded MQA content is an MQA decoder. In a similar manner, you need a CD player to get access to the audio on a CD - that does not to my mind make CD a conditional access scheme, nor DRM. Neither is MQA.

I'm afraid it isn't obvious to me how MQA can implement copy protection either. Perhaps you could spell out your proposed mechanism.

 

"In almost 40 years of attending audio press events, only rarely have I come away feeling that I was present at the birth of a new world"
John Atkinson on MQA

I must have missed their impartial and critical look at MQA. It might be there but it is definitely lost amongst all the enthusiastic support.

As for everything I've read that you have written on MQA you come across as a pretty ardent supporter. As does everyone one else that I have read in the main stream audio press. How many instances have you implied that the battle to get studios to release their archives in FLAC is dead in this thread because they have chosen MQA?

Anyways this whole debate is boring. The hard science has always been against hirez. Hopefully MQA lives up to some of it's hype and I'm looking forward to reading the results of the McGill University study. It will be fun to revisit this topic and this thread after that study is published. In the mean time I will be trying out Roon and Tidal and since I have an iFi Audio Nano Black I'll get to hear it for myself.

 

It appears we agree on everything but whether or not folks are personally attacking Lee. Since Lee being the center of the conversation is both the fundamental flaw of this thread (for which, with all respect, Lee is the one who bears responsibility), and since him being at the center also is the least important aspect of this discussion, I will be happy to move on from that issue, and by the same token I suggest we all do the same.

 

Just a quick question about the whole bits thing. The last I'd heard there were no DACs out there capable of a true 24 bits. Most high end DACs top out around 19 bits of resolution do they not?

 

Forgive my suspicions. Interesting question from a 1st time poster .

Have a look at my blog post where I've enumerated concerns. And have a look at the recent presentation in Leipzig.

 

The 'full access' is only with the playback session thru the MQA DAC. That hirez data stream persists only so long as you are playing an MQA encoded file and only within the MAQ DAC.

This is not the same as actually having your own copy of the hirez data file. You also cannot apply any other DAC filtering - only what MQA provides or permits.

You can turn MQA off, but then it is no longer the unfolded full hirez data stream - just 'redbook'.

CD data is just PCM - you can copy it and have the same bit for bit equivalence on hard disk or the CD - not so with MQA.

 

Correct. At best something like 20-21 bits with the best DACs out there.

But the problem is that MQA barely seems to get past 16-bits... So what's the point of even calling this "hi-res" much less pay money to "upgrade" a DAC to being MQA-capable or paying more monthly for the so-called high resolution stream?

Remember guys, it's not just me saying that MQA is typically <16-bits. Get it straight from Bob Stuart at around 31:05 in the interview and "up to" 17-bits.

 

I don't pay extra for THX. It's embedded in the functionality of the software when the encoded disc meets the amp or player that can handle the standard. It's pretty much ubiquitous these days and installed practically by default. MQA? Let's see how that horse runs...

 

Personal attacks: replying to every single poster and discounting or dismissing their opinion or evidence with ad-hominim attacks.

Instead, test yourself - try not responding to this message, just let it sit there unanswered as a kernel of evidence you aren't the attacker.

Don't feed the trolls.

 

"You also cannot apply any other DAC filtering - only what MQA provides or permits."
I don't follow. DACs can process the 17 bit 96khz output anyway they see fit.
Garbage in, garbage out.

"I don't pay extra for THX." But you do pay for it.

 

What I'm saying is you cannot have both: MQA full data rate unfolding and then sending that to the DAC of your choice with their own filtering; the full unfolding and the possible filtering is wholey and totally encapsulated in what MQA provides.

 

No. Schitt Yagi is 21 bits and many other implementations that are better. Some have the measurements to get very close to 24 bits.

Unfortunately the equipment after starts becoming the bottleneck.

 

In fact, an ideal delivery "compression" method would be to downsample and noise-shaped dither to a new specification like 18 bits. Adding just two bits, and 12dB of noise floor and dynamic range to the capabilities of redbook audio is more than could be desired when the audibility is doubtful, and I see nothing wrong with stating that is what you are doing. Marketeers would say "not true HD audio" "18 bits - not good enough", without a listen that they can't usually tell 14 from 16 bits.

FLAC, for example, is only optimized for whole bytes (16 or 24 bit) and wav only can contain those bit depths. It could instead be tweaked to perform high compression on arbitrary-bit-depth files. In fact, one can fill the bottom bits of high-res audio with 0s (when, on loud passages, the low end of dynamic range is not needed), and compression algorithms already compress them well.

 

Where are these measurements? The best that I have seen are between -120 and -126 dB noise + distortion, maybe closer to -130 dB if you weight the noise. So at best 21-22 bits, more realistically 21

OTOH, some people seem to feel that bit depth may be about more than just signal to noise ratio

 

That's where I got the 17-bits figure from. Thanks. To clarify, though, Stuart says that 17-bit resolution is the quality you get if there is no decoding.

 

Yes, it is about dynamic range as well.

 

Although that is also a specification and function related to noise, if the ADC/DAC has no appreciable distortion:

Total Harmonic Distortion + Noise (THD+N)
The ratio of the rms value of the signal to the rms sum of all other spectral components over the specified
bandwidth (typically 10 Hz to 20 kHz), including distortion components. Expressed in decibels.
Dynamic Range
The ratio of the full scale rms value of the signal to the rms sum of all other spectral components over the
specified bandwidth. Dynamic range is a signal-to-noise measurement over the specified bandwidth
made with a -60 dBFS signal. 60 dB is then added to the resulting measurement to refer the measurement
to full scale. This technique ensures that the distortion components are below the noise level and do not
effect the measurement. This measurement technique has been accepted by the Audio Engineering Society,
AES17-1991, and the Electronic Industries Association of Japan, EIAJ CP-307.
​

THD+Noise: usable bit depth of undistorted music
Dynamic range: eliminates distortion from noise measurement

 

yes and um, headroom for intersample overs that cause distortion and clipping.
I'm getting out of my bit depth so

 

Not when I go to my video on demand service I don't. No separate THX equipped payment there.

 

Devialet’s Pro dual monos specs are up there though not specifc to if weighted or not. -133bB snr

The signature version of my dac is <-124db noise and >135db dr